A rework of an effort last year, the 2018 legislative session’s House Bill 1275 once again attempts to implement a geographic diversity requirement to signatures on initiative petitions. As of this writing, the proposal would require that the signatures come from at least two-thirds of the state’s legislative districts and that circulators reside in the county they’re collecting signatures in.

While last year’s bill went by county instead of district, this would still kneecap the voters’ ability to initiate any statute or amendment. Last year, I analyzed the data of geographic area and voter population in each county. I found that the bottom third of counties in terms of voter density have less than two voters per square mile.

With such low density, it would take more circulators traveling more distance in districts rural even by our standards to get questions on the ballot. The time and money just wouldn’t be there for volunteer efforts. Only well-heeled out-of-state interests would be able to fund such efforts under such a scheme. Those are the interests the legislators say they want to prevent from using South Dakota “as a petri dish” (quote: Sen. Deborah Soholt, Dist. 14, at the Feb. 3 Legislative Coffee in Sioux Falls) to see what will work elsewhere.

The legislators say they want ballot questions to be representative of S.D. as a whole; they forget (perhaps, conveniently) this is what the actual vote is for. The legislators say they don’t want to keep the people from being able to use the initiative process; this would do it. Certainly, they say a lot of things. They know full well what they’re doing with this and all the other attacks on initiative. Write them. Call them. Confront them. Stop them.

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